Creator and rehab coach Tayla Cannon has raised $1.1 million from Slow Ventures’ $60 million Creator Fund to build Rebuildr, a HIPAA-compliant platform for physical therapy and rehab professionals, allowing them to operate current online practices offering care.
The seed investment is a sign of how health tech more broadly is changing: creators with subject-matter expertise and built-in audiences are starting to ship software that reimagines the ways care happens, and scales.
From creator to health tech founder: Tayla Cannon’s path
Cannon came to the United States from Australia to work in interventional cardiology before learning more about performance rehab and pain education. What started as sharing honest training updates and proactive pain strategies across social channels ballooned into over 130,000 followers on Instagram for the former bodybuilder who now has a coaching business, Athletic Rebuild. The next natural application, she realized, was software that outpaced her calendar.
She encountered Slow Ventures when she came to a community event in Austin and connected with investor Megan Lightcap. Cannon wasn’t even actively fundraising at the time, but her thesis struck a chord: the traditional rehab model is local, reactive and bound by insurance and 30-minute appointments; software has the potential to scale clinician capacity and deliver higher-quality care anywhere.
Inside Rebuildr’s product vision for modern rehab practices
Rebuildr is an OS for the independent rehab professional/small practice. The platform is anticipated to offer functionality for program design, exercise prescription with video, progress tracking, asynchronous check-ins, payments and a mentorship layer that aids new clinicians in developing clinical and business skills.
Because health care data is so sensitive, Cannon is focusing on security from day one — HIPAA alignment (though they are not currently HIPAA certified), role-based access controls, audit logs, and encryption. The idea is to facilitate easy Business Associate Agreements for practices, and to maintain patient communication and program data within controlled workflows instead of scattered across consumer apps.
On the differentiation front, Cannon is wagering that marrying creator-led education with clinician-grade tools will lower patient acquisition costs for providers and increase adherence. A lot of the PT tools out there focus on documentation or billing; Rebuildr is couching this platform in proactive, remote-first care with a robust community and education arm.
A creator fund bets on distribution in digital health
Slow Ventures created the Creator Fund to support founders who already have a following online and can convert that reach into product usage. In software, distribution is too often the hardest problem; creators are lucky to start with a built-in channel. That’s relevant in health, where customer acquisition costs have been climbing as paid performance channels become increasingly saturated — according to many digital health funding analyses from Rock Health and others who monitor the business.
Cannon’s audience gives Rebuildr early velocity with athletes and active consumers as well as clinicians who seek to develop hybrid or entirely online practices. It’s a play that has worked in adjacent industries: coaching platforms like Trainerize, TrainHeroic and Everfit partly grew by enabling fitness professionals to productize their programs; clinic software including WebPT and Physitrack digitized in-person processes. Rebuildr is focusing on trying to merge those worlds for rehab.
Market context for digital rehab: trends and benchmarks
Employers repeatedly point to musculoskeletal conditions as a leading cost driver for health spend, and digital MSK programs have scaled quickly — look at the growth of Hinge Health and another company called Sword Health. And, for its part, telehealth use has settled consistently higher than pre-2020 rates; McKinsey research calculates that virtual care is now a durable share of all ambulatory visits. The American Physical Therapy Association has cataloged long-term hybrid models across the profession, capturing desire for flexible care outside of clinic walls.
The opportunity presented itself: deliver high-quality rehab in a way that was not geographically or wait-list bound, nor insurance-based — and offer clinicians software informed by a continuous-care philosophy, rather than visit-episode thinking.
If Rebuildr can show higher compliance, quicker return to play, or lower cost of care, it will be welcomed with open arms by self-pay athletes and value-focused employers both.
What comes next for Rebuildr and its early rollout
Cannon says she will use the seed round to grow the engineering team, harden compliance and get a head start on its launch.
Look for early pilots with her community and a group of independent PTs who are interested in productizing their knowledge. Key proof points to look for:
- Clinician retention on the platform
- Patient adoption of prescribed programs
- Measurable outcomes
- Whether creator-led distribution can outperform paid acquisition benchmarks
It’s a bet that an artist’s truth and a clinician’s rigor can coexist in one product. If Cannon is correct, then Rebuildr could play a role in moving rehab from reactive visits to constant coaching — and give thousands of rehab professionals the software spine they need to construct sustainable practices Godin would recognize.